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Essay- Social bookmarking tools in education
Recently, social bookmarking has become very popular in education. Many teachers complete and handout reading lists for students to use in assignments; this would be simplified and made more accessible by using a link to an online version of the teacher's preferred lists electronically through a social bookmarking site. Similarly, central to an institution, library or learning resource staff can create an electronic bank of researched and, more importantly, reviewed and verified web links for students to access from a VLE or the institution's website. So what’s so different about this type of bookmarking? What are the benefits and how can it help with teaching and learning? Think of your own experiences and reflect on how many times you have given a recommended reading list to your students only to find that the resources are no longer available. Recommended online resources in course booklets, by nature of the dynamics of the Internet, are often no longer available. This is both frustrating for you and your students. Bookmarking can solve this problem. Educational Case Study ''' The case study below will give you further information and ideas for using social bookmarking in education. ''Exploring the Use of Social Bookmarking Technology in Education: An Analysis of Students’ Experiences using a Course-specific Delicious.com Account '' This study shows how social bookmarking, specifically Delicious.com, can be used in a course to provide an inexpensive answer to the question of rising course materials costs. Through a series of online focus groups, 53 students enrolled in a “Social Media and Public Relations” course revealed their apprehension toward using an unknown technology and discussed their positive and negative experiences with using the course-specific Delicious.com account. Implications for how social bookmarking can impact online and offline learning are discussed. ''This study sought to examine how students view social bookmarking in relation to the learning process through the following three research questions: ''' • RQ1: How aware are students of social bookmarking? • RQ2: How do students describe their experiences with using a centralised social bookmarking account as a replacement for a course packet? • RQ3: What are the biggest advantages and disadvantages of social bookmarking in higher education from students’ perspectives? '''Managing the Curriculum ' It is standard practice for teachers to collaborate when planning and delivering the curriculum, including the collection and sharing of resources. Social bookmarking enables teachers to do this more effectively, creating comprehensive resource lists and in particular, creating a class or Faculty account. When planning for a new academic year or new module or subject, this tool enables the teacher to manage their links ready for the students. Once you have lots of links saved and tagged with relevant keywords, this now opens up a whole new avenue of resources to both you and your students and as the collection of resources grows, it becomes a valuable tool for learning and teaching. 'Collaboration and Sharing ' Once you have bookmarked a site and organised it, you now may want to share it. Sharing is the most useful part of any social bookmarking tool. When users then rank the usefulness of a site, this rating also relates to the quality of the resource. What better for educational purposes! Both teachers and students can create a group account with a shared password. An advancement of this would be to create a unique tag for all group related links. Many social bookmarking sites also allow teachers to review and comment on links submitted by their students. Let us now look at some educational uses in more detail in the Case Study in the next section. 'Searching the Void ' Using the internet for research has always been a contentious issue in education. Students choosing to use this route for their research, often end up sourcing biased or unreliable websites. A Google search returns the most popular sites, but often the least useful in educational research. Social bookmarking provides a tool for learners to involve themselves in human collaboration, where by searching other peoples´ links, you find like-minded researchers, in-turn, more valuable links. The beauty is, everything that has been saved is someone’s favourite – the work has been done for you! Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as the practice of ‘classifying resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags’.34 In essence, social bookmarking services enable users to collect and annotate (tag) their favourite web links in an online, open environment, which others are usually free to read and use (bookmarks stored in a central server location accessible from any machine). The end result is the sharing and easy distribution of resources.12 Social bookmarking services usually allow individual bookmarks to be designated as public (shared) or private. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword (tag), person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classification schemes (folksonomies =‘folk taxonomies’ made of tags) that registered users have created and saved.35 Examples of social bookmarking services include del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), Furl (http://www.furl.net), CiteULike (http://www.citeulike.org/—a social bookmarking site for academic papers), and Connotea (http://www.connotea.org/). The latter, created in December 2004 by Nature Publishing Group, is a free online reference management and sharing service for scientists, researchers, and clinicians 'The Use of Social Bookmarking Tools in Vocational Education ' 'Activity One: Setting up a Collaborative Account ' Create a class delicious account to work collaboratively on areas of your vocational curriculum. Students can suggest class specific tags and get into the habit of contributing to the account. Discussion can then take place as to the value of each in relation to a given topic. 'Activity Two: Networks ' Using tags that relate to your area of vocational teaching, research other users that have added particular sites to their accounts and add them to your Network. Encourage all students to create their own delicious accounts, and be added to the Network so they will automatically keeping abreast of the classes web resources. 'Activity Three: Homework & Work-Based Assignments ' Teachers can add to the delicious account specific websites that they want the students to access as part of a homework of work-based assignment. The students can be encouraged to build a delicious-based group of links as part of their assignment submission. 'Activity Four: Develop Research and Digital Literacy Skills ' Develop research and digital literacy skills in students by rating and reviewing websites and recommending them to their peers. A valuable exercise would be for students to evaluate the validity of information obtained online with the information they have from the course on the same subject. 'Curriculum Planning and Management Ideas ' • Libraries can create an account for all learners under subject headings, for use within a VLE or Website. Subject librarians can tag links to publishers and book suppliers to keep up-to-date with new resources • Teachers can manage the curriculum through saving links to all the examination boards and syllabuses by using a specific tag • Teachers can create a bank of online or interactive resources to be used in the classroom • Create a tag for resources for Continuing, Professional Development • Plan for particular calendar events, holidays/festivals, including the date in the tag • Create a Network for networking with other educators • Create a Faculty or subject account for storing and sharing teaching resources